First wave feminism, which got women the vote, was a wonderful and necessary thing for a healthy society. Second wave feminism, which got women equal pay for equal work, and which gave them equal access to work that did not dependent on attributes unique to the male sex, was a wonderful and necessary thing for a healthy society. Since then, though, it’s all been downhill, with “New-Wave” feminism engendering all sorts of trends that are damaging for women as individuals and for society as a whole.

The new wave of feminism says that women are wasting themselves looking for a stable married life with a partner who will work with them to raise the next generation of children. Instead, women are being encouraged to have promiscuous “hook-up” sex, which leaves them physically and emotionally vulnerable. At the same time, they’re being encouraged to delay their child-rearing years so that, when they finally want children, many of them discover that they can’t have them or can only have them at great expense, while most of them discover that taking care of small children when you’re almost 40 is a lot tougher than doing the same in your mid-20s. (For more on this, see Camille Paglia’s spot-on essay about putting sex back in sex education.)

The new wave of feminism says that men are evil and oppressive rapists and that they need to be tightly controlled. This is a fun-house mirror image of the equally horrific sharia doctrine that says that men are too weak to resist women’s enticements and that women therefore need to be tightly controlled. This isn’t just a playful “war of the sexes;” it’s a war of attrition between the sexes that envisions, not marriage and children and partnerships, but a zero sum game, with one side reduced to sexual slavery.

The new wave of feminism says that women, despite being able to “roar” (see both Helen Reddy and Katy Perry) are in fact perpetual victims. Evil men stand ready to beat them, rape them, take their jobs, steal their education, demean them and otherwise commit horrible punishments upon them unless the government intervenes on women’s behalf.

The new wave of feminism says babies are disposable. They interfere with the whole “free love” and “career” dynamic. Abortion, rather than being a last resort when the women’s situation is untenable, becomes a first resort to get rid of an inconvenience.

It turns out that the new wave of feminism may not be so good for women in the military either. An organization called “Center for Military Readiness,” which bills itself as a non-partisan entity focused solely on the best policies for America’s military, has put out a position paper saying that the Obama administration’s decision to force women onto the front line in combat zones isn’t just bad for the military, its bad for women too. Here are just a few of its observations:

1. Military Women Do Not Want To Serve in the Combat Arms

A recent survey of Army personnel thoroughly discredited the idea that most uniformed women actually want to serve in land combat fighting teams that currently are all-male.

[snip]

2. Three Pull-Up Test Not Suitable for Female Boot Camp Trainees

Pentagon civilians and military leaders keep claiming that sufficient numbers of women will meet “gender-neutral” standards before they serve in the combat arms. Now comes reality, revealed at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot at Parris Island, SC.

In 2012, General Amos announced a multi-phased program to assess the feasibility of women serving in the combat arms. The process is supposed to be careful and “measured,” but the Marines have not produced any metrics or empirical evidence that women are or can be trained to be interchangeable with men in “tip of the spear” combat teams that attack the enemy. In fact, most indicators are to the contrary.

And so it goes, with page after page of evidence showing that women don’t want to be in combat, that women cannot meet current combat-readiness standards, and that women are injured when they try to reach those standards. That last resonates with me. Women have very different bone, muscle, tendon, and ligament configurations. Even the strongest woman you know isn’t going to have all the muscles protecting her neck that a heavily muscled man can amass. Her joints are going to be looser too, which is great for carrying and delivering babies, but lousy for hauling heavy packs and engaging in intense physical combat.

This biological reality explains why CrossFit, a Northern California fitness training company (and therefore almost certainly reliably Progressive in outlet) is refusing to let a male to female transgender person compete as a woman in an upcoming fitness competition. Chloie Jonsson may have effected a cosmetic change so that her exterior self aligns with her interior belief about herself (and there’s nothing wrong with that), but there is no procedure that changes Jonsson’s lifelong development as a male, with dense bones, heavy muscles, and strong tendons and ligaments:

CrossFit’s general counsel, Dale Saran, would not comment on the suit, which seeks $2.5 million in damages. Saran directed The AP to a CrossFit online discussion board, where he posted that Jonsson had not supplied medical documents to back up her assertion that she was a woman.

“The fundamental, ineluctable fact is that a male competitor who has a sex reassignment procedure still has a genetic makeup that confers a physical and physiological advantage over women,” Saran wrote in a letter to McCoy that’s linked to the discussion board.

Exactly.

But back to the the CMR report. You really should read the whole thing. It’s based on hard-data, rather than academic theory, and, as is always the case when there’s a showdown between real world facts and Progressive theory, the facts win every time.